


Red Lining

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-24 07:32:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13208949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: Prompt: Tell me what happens to Chuck's jacket after the apocalypse is cancelled. Characters above are just possible, use as many or as few as you need for the tale.Merry belated Christmas, pickleplum!





	Red Lining

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pickleplum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pickleplum/gifts).



The package arrives by courier. Raleigh watches Mako sign for it, watches her accept it in both hands and consider the old fashioned twine and brown paper wrapping, the lack of a return address. She glances to him and he lifts a brow, and she fetches the shears and snips the twine.

The paper folds back on its own. There is a note pinned to the collar of the jacket. Raleigh reads it moments later, after Mako carefully bundles the jacket to her chest and takes it away, when he’s putting the paper in the recycle bin. The handwriting is workmanlike, in black ballpoint on a sheet from a notepad bearing the Sofitel Sydney Wentworth logo. _I’m sorry_ , it says. _It needs something, and I can’t do it_.

Days later he finds it in the closet, far on the right, behind their dress blues. Whatever it needs, it isn’t the eleventh kill symbol on the back. Herc added that himself.

Raleigh’s hand brushes the upper pocket as he’s pushing the hangers back into place. Something makes a hollow sound. He reaches inside, past leather and past a scrap of silk he knows without looking is golden, to find a rounded metal rectangle with raised letters. Stacker’s pill case.

Jaeger jockeys had some superstitions, back when there were enough of them to make a culture. They weren’t sure, early in the program, how much a Jaeger kept of its pilots. The Pons unit was a thing half magic, made of technology no one person fully understood. If ever a pilot died and a Jaeger was still operational, would there be a trace of them in the Drift?

Back then, there were no opportunities to find out, and it seemed as though there never would be. When he Drifted in Danger again, all he found of Yancy was what he brought with him. But Raleigh has never believed an object must have a five hundred petabyte hard drive to harbor a ghost.

In three Drifts, he saw nothing of Chuck Hansen in Mako’s memories. He wouldn’t have known to look, then.

On the anniversary of Pitfall they stay home and speak nary a word. Raleigh tries to read a book, but his eyes scan the same paragraph twenty times and retain nothing. His memories pry him away, as does Mako’s closed quiet. Late in the afternoon she rises silently from the couch and disappears into the bedroom.

He follows after a while and sees her out on the balcony. She doesn’t smoke, neither of them do, but but she stands like she has a cigarette in her hand, elbows on the railing, arms crossed at the wrists out over thirty storeys of empty space, her gaze on their obscured view of the sunset over the Pacific.

The jacket is big on her. If she were smoking, the smell would saturate the leather. He imagines the shape of the pill case must sit heavily just above her heart.

Raleigh sits on the bed, and waits for her to return to him.

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by the wonderful Confabulatrix!


End file.
